At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Joe Brett—veteran and Harvard Kennedy School alumnus—addresses Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War. He writes, “I gave them a pin of my old unit, 24th Corps, which happens to be a blue heart on a white shield…or in this case a symbol for peace. We all wept when I gave this out with the words that it was up to us to all work for peace, now that we have met each other as brothers at this memorial…One former Soviet colonel hugged me and, with tears in his eyes, said that all soldiers should be veterans.”

At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Joe Brett—veteran and Harvard Kennedy School alumnus—addresses Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War. He writes, “I gave them a pin of my old unit, 24th Corps, which happens to be a blue heart on a white shield…or in this case a symbol for peace. We all wept when I gave this out with the words that it was up to us to all work for peace, now that we have met each other as brothers at this memorial…One former Soviet colonel hugged me and, with tears in his eyes, said that all soldiers should be veterans.”

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In Myanmar, with Proximity Designs

Debbie Aung Din Taylor (with red hat), co-founder of Proximity Designs, meets with villagers in A Phaung Gyi, in Dedaye township in the Ayeyarwaddy River Delta. Many of the villagers use crop loans provided by Proximity Designs to plant rice. It also provides agricultural advice, and now distributes a line of popular, low-cost solar lights (90 percent of Myanmar's rural households are not on an electrical grid).

Proximity Designs now sells d.light solar lights—typically, on a multimonth installment plan. The basic light, shown here, has the most basic of uses: enabling reading, or homework, at night, in lieu of candles, which are expensive, a fire hazard in bamboo houses, and unsuitable for use under mosquito netting. (The white paste on the girl’s cheeks is thanaka, a cosmetic paste made from ground bark, which many women and girls in Myanmar apply to guard against sunburn and to protect the skin.)

Rural agents come to Yangon for product and sales training during the monsoon season. For some of the agents, shown here at the 2013 training session, the visit to Yangon is their first immersion in city life.

U Myat Thein, an entrepreneurial farmer and now a village agent for Proximity Designs, grows corn as a cash crop in Wakouktaw village, Kungyangon township; with his wife, Daw Khin Ohn Myint, and their youngest child, daughter Thin Thin Myat, he welcomes visitors to their home—fans at the ready for the delta's heat and humidity.

Proximity Designs' water basket in farm use: using a treadle pump, farmers can collect and move water and then distribute it by hose or drip irrigation lines—huge improvements in time and labor compared to bearing buckets of water on their shoulders with a wooden yoke.

“Sowing Seeds,” in the January-February 2014 Harvard Magazine, reports on an alumni-founded social enterprise, Proximity Designs, working in Myanmar to boost farmers' incomes with affordable rural technologies. The article also describes the collaboration between Proximity Designs and economic and policy analysts at Harvard who study the country's shattered economy, its prospects for growth, and broad changes needed in governance and civic life to bring about better lives for Myamnar’s largely impoverished people. These images supplement the photographs accompanying the article; they show Proximity Designs' products and services as they are manufactured, distributed, and used in Myanmar today.